science and religion

Once again Comedy Central is the forum for calm, reasoned debate.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book on the dangers of Positive Thinking recalls Mark Twain’s obsession with the 19th century’s most famous mind-over-matter exponent: Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. Are critics just jealous?

Having abandoned its roots in art, the dehumanization of the world, and the metaphysical, environmentalism has made common cause with its natural enemies and arrived at a place where its holy grail is reducing carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million.

A disturbing story emerged this week of a scientist leaving his research out of fear for his and his family’s lives. What are our responsibilities in this area and what do our traditions have to say about it?

Saying that science is “just another linguistic system” plays well in humanities departments and at certain Ivy League divinity schools. But it makes about as much contact with real science as astrology does.

Into the often childish and bloody conflict between religion and science comes a humble suggestion: “Art is the New Religion.”

In one of this week’s features, eminent scholar Philip Clayton proposes that we are entering a new stage in the tangle between religion and science. Professor Robert Tapp responds.

For 200 years religion, medical science, and psychology have been involved in an intricate, shifting alliance in response to addiction. With recent studies calling core principles of AA into question—like the admission of powerlessness, for example—is AA still the best we’ve got for addressing addiction, or would a different theological model work better?

The New Atheists, armed with swords and cudgels, are still doing old-fashioned battle with religion; but they haven’t noticed that the skirmish may have passed them by. Are religion and science poised for a truce?

The way we live will lead, inevitably, to the extinction of half of the planet’s biodiversity by century’s end. How can our morality, or our religion, prepare us for this?